Re: multlingual titles in refdb

Christian Wittern <[email protected]> was heard to say:

> Hi there,
>
> For a project here, I would like to adopt refdb for bibliographic data
> management.  However, one of the requirements is to be able to have
> multilingual titles, that is titles repeated for different languages.  As an
> example, I might have a title of a Japanese paper in original script
> (Kanji+Kana), Roman Transcription, translation into English, translation
> into German etc.
> I wonder how refdb could deal with this.  It appears that at the moment all
> fields are language-agnostic, right?  Would it be possible to introduce
> language at some level?

Hi,

RefDB cannot deal with this at the moment. Current practice in  
biomedical sciences is to provide the native title, followed by the  
translated title in square brackets. I'm well aware that this is not  
sufficient for the humanities.

Adding language support to article and publication titles requires a  
couple of internal changes. Currently the title is part of the main  
reference entry, except for periodical titles which are already stored  
in a separate table. At this time RefDB only supports a fixed number  
of periodical synonyms. In order to support titles in different  
languages, we'd have to change this to a key-value kind of storage,  
with multiple keys indicating the type and language of a title. This  
is basically doable, but it will require quite a bit of coding time  
(which I'm particularly short of at the moment). Also, it will require  
extensions to the query language as you'd have to be able to query  
specific translations of a title to make full use of these changes,  
something like ":TX[en]:~whatever" to query the English version of a  
title. Adding language support to other fields (which ones would be  
required?) would follow the same pattern and would add quite a bit of  
complexity to the whole thing.

To sum it up, RefDB could be modified to suit your needs, but this is  
nothing that I could do on a rainy sunday afternoon.

regards,
Markus





-- 
Markus Hoenicka
http://www.mhoenicka.de
AQ score 38



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